The following are a few excellent situations in which making a lateral move is a good idea:

When you need to learn new skills: If you truly feel as though you’ve learned everything there is to know about your current position, taking a position with similar pay but different responsibilities can help you develop new skillsets that might aid you in future job hunts.

When you need to secure your future: If the future of your current company — or even just your position itself — is looking bleak, it’s not a bad idea to take on different job elsewhere, even if that job is pretty much the same as the one you had before.

When the situation at your current work becomes untenable: Maybe you and your boss have had one too many disagreements. Maybe your coworkers have grown to resent you. Maybe the company’s culture has just become too toxic for you in general, or you’ve realized there’s no chance of you being promoted from within at this point. If you find yourself in any of these positions, it’s worth it to make a lateral move to another company or department.

3. Times When Making a Lateral Move Might Be a Bad Idea

While there are a lot of great reasons to make a lateral move with your career, it’s important to keep in mind that not all reasons are good ones.

That is to say that, depending on your individual circumstances, a lateral move might still be a bad move for you personally.

Here are just a few situations in which a lateral move might not be the best option for you:

When you’re actually just unhappy with your job: If you’re making a lateral move in order to break yourself out of the monotony of your particular position, that’s one thing — but if the problem is that you just don’t like being (say, for example) a programmer, then taking on another programming job somewhere else isn’t going to solve your problem.

When you move into a position that’s too far away from your goal: It’s possible to take on a similar position whose responsibilities are nonetheless so far away from what you were doing before that your lateral move can actually become a step backward. You want to be sure that you’re taking on a position that’s moving you closer to your ultimate career goal rather than further away from it — or, at the very least, you want one that’s equidistant.

When you’ve already made too many other lateral moves: If you keep moving from one similar position to another without ever moving up, then eventually, someone is going to start wondering why you aren’t getting promoted. Whether their fears are justified or not, it’s not a good look for you.

Wrapping Up:

That’s all for this one! Just keep in mind:

Any time you make a lateral move, you want to keep your ultimate career goal in mind.

Then use this career goal as the measuring stick for deciding how well your lateral move is going.

As long as it gets you closer to this goal — or at least solves some of your problems while not taking you any further away from your goal — then your lateral move was most likely a big success.